Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/780

760 a knowledge of biology, and biology has its foundations in chemistry and physics. I do not think there is any one whose opinion one would care for who disputes these relations, but the necessities of them there are many who do not see; they are those whose ideas of physical relations are misty and unsound.

These are the essential things that every man ought to know whatever else he may know, for they have to do with the every-day life of every man. With them he is best prepared to act wisely in every calling in life, and without them right acting is a haphazard affair, as one is likely as not to be at war with the nature of things, even when his intentions are irreproachable. The stars in their courses fought against Sisera, but Nature never begins a contention. When one is initiated, she never asks for the character of the litigant. No distinction is made between ignorance and intention, piety and depravity, and no contention is ever settled by compromise, it is always an unconditional surrender. These are therefore the things that a college should teach, whatever else it might offer. But these are not to be learned from books. They must be got at first hand to be useful. It may be noted that these things are not to be learned so much for the facts presented as for the relations implied, though a true relation is as much a fact as any illustration of it can be. The law of gravitation is as much a fact as water running down hill is, and the continuity of phenomena is of vastly more importance to the race to know than all the mental efforts of the race before the time of Newton. If once accepted it dominates everywhere.

This is the condition of things that confronts us. The past has already been broken from, whether all are conscious of it or not. Its great ones are no longer our teachers and leaders in knowledge. The point of view of human affairs is not only changed, but there is demanded a change in the ideals of the race. Science has given us a new heaven and a new earth. The education of the past has proved not only inadequate, but wholly incompetent to train a mind so that it can assimilate or appreciate genuine knowledge. The names of those who have built up this new body, with few exceptions, can not be found on the registers of the great schools. Does it not appear to the disadvantage of the great schools that the discoveries which have so revolutionized men's ways of thinking and doing were nearly all made by men who had few or no opportunities for school education? To name but a few, think of Watt, of Stephenson, of Dalton, of Faraday, of Joule, of Huxley, of Spencer, of Franklin, of Henry, of Edison. There are no corresponding names to stand beside them for attainments, and the record of the exceptions is mostly for stupidity in the school work, while the opposition and hindrance to the general reception of new truth in any field have always been